The advent of spam, phishing scams, and tightened legislations on combatting these email menaces have put the effectiveness of email marketing on the line. Marketers began to have questions whether emails can still bring the level of response it did a few years ago. Are customers even receiving the emails? Or are the marketing emails being filtered alongside spam? Are customers so inundated with emails that they no longer welcome emails from marketers?

Internet Retailer magazine sought to find out how marketers are viewing and using email to promote their businesses. The magazine sent out a survey to 32,000 subscribers of their daily email newsletter and found the following results:

• 68.3% of respondents say that they are not only using email, but they are doing more email marketing now than before. The main reasons cited for the increasing use of email is to support their growing retail web business (38.1%) and to stay in closer touch with customers (36.8%)
• Only 13.2% have been using email less. Of those who are using email less, the main reason cited is the declining response rates with spam.
• However, 71% of the respondents attribute only 10% of their sales to the email marketing they do
• According to 34.8% of the respondents, conversion rate from shoppers who visited the site after an email marketing message is only less than 2%. Only 8.2% of the respondents say that their conversion rate is 15% or higher
• 49% of the respondents say that email is much/somewhat more effective in generating online sales compared to other forms of marketing